Because our class blog will emphasize theorizing composition at UM, this first post will explain the concept, offer strategies for theorizing, and a rationale for this focus. When it’s your turn to post, you’ll lead us in theorizing teaching WRIT 101 using the week’s readings as a focus. At the end of the semester, you’ll have an opportunity to submit two revised posts or comments or two posts/comments with new commentary in your portfolio.
In the context of our class blog, your goal is to engage course readings and concepts in dialogue with your ongoing teaching experiences using theorizing. This theorizing is intended to be an empowering means for understanding and constructing your teaching lives.
My definition of theory and theorizing draws on inter-related perspectives by Sidney Dobrin, Shirley Rose and Irwin Weiser, and Karen A. Foss, Sonya K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin. In the foreword to Sidney Dobrin’s Constructing Knowledges, Patricia Bizzell sets up a critical distinction between Theory and theory: “Whereas ‘Theory’ tends to be thought of as something static, like a table of laws, ‘theory’ is better thought of as a process or an activity—‘theorizing’ or ‘theory talk’” (Bizzell 2). We’ll engage in theory talk then rather than Theory. Theory with a little “t” is a “framework within which one can operate, ask questions, even alter or refine principles of that theory based on new experience, new observation” (Dobrin 9). This sense of theory as an activity for understanding and acting is reinforced and complemented by Foss, Foss, and Griffin’s feminist definition of theory as “a way of framing an experience or event—an effort to understand and account for something and the way it functions in the world” in Feminist Rhetorical Theories (8). Their emphasis on theorizing as something individuals do daily in composing their lives makes the prospect of theorizing accessible to new teacher-scholars: “Individuals theorize when they try to figure out answers for, develop explanations about, and organize what is happening in their worlds” (Foss, Foss, and Griffin 8). The sense of agency their definition conveys is particularly compelling and empowering for those of us who are used to thinking of theory as reserved for esteemed, often male scholars and inclined to assume teaching writing is only a practical rather than conceptual endeavor. Understanding theory as a way to conceptualize and order one’s world deflates the mystical quality typically attributed to academic Theory and challenges the idea that teaching is merely figuring out the nuts and bolts of being in the classroom and relying on recipes for teaching writing.
Just as we theorize regularly in our lives, we can learn to extend this activity to teaching WRIT 101. According to Rose and Weiser in The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist: Making Knowledge Work ,“We turn to theorizing when … we are faced with a new situation and we need to understand that situation in order to decide how or whether to act, and when we need to explain or rationalize a practice” (191-92). Arguably, new teachers need theorizing, and we’ll embark on this activity together by creating a space where we can read, question, explain, interpret, (re)frame information, (re)define, reflect and learn together.
